• Unicom Adds HP3000 Biz with Cognos ADT Buy

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  On the last day of 2013, Unicom Systems announced that it acquired the Cognos Application Development Tools (ADT) from IBM. The ADT suit, including the PowerHouse 4GL tools, were used extensively in the HP3000 and VMS worlds, and although the tools haven’t seen new features in years, Unicom sees the acquisition as strategic. The ADT suite is composed of the PowerHouse server, PowerHouse Web, and Axiant 4GL tools. PowerHouse is a byte-compiled 4GL originally produced by Cognos-predecessor Quasar Corp. in 1982. The 4GL used a centralized data dictionary approach to speed development of applications, and found success against popular

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• Got IBM i Innovation? Get Your Award Application in by Feb. 10

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  What great feats of IBM i innovation have you been party to lately? If you have a story worth sharing with the rest of the IBM i universe, you have about three weeks to submit it for your chance at glory and a COMMON/IBM Power Systems Innovation Award. Every spring, an Innovation Award is bestowed upon one worthy IBM i shop at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition event. This year, February 10 is the deadline for submitting your application for the 2014 COMMON conference, which is taking place the first week in May in beautiful Orlando, Florida. You

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• IBM Buys Aspera for Big WAN Data Transfers

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week completed its acquisition of Aspera, the Northern California developer of the patented “fasp” WAN acceleration technology. IBM says it plans to offer Aspera’s technology and the fasp protocol as part of its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure. The fasp technology that Aspera sold as part of its eXtreme File Transfer (XFT) product is able to accelerate the transfer of large files by up to 99.9 percent. When applied against a large 24 GB file sent from here to China, that kind of technical mojo will reduce transmission times from 26 hours to 30 seconds. That is a serious

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• Attunity Buys Hayes for SAP Data Chops

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Data replication software provider Attunity last month spent $6 million to acquire Hayes Technology Group, a company that specializes in developing data management tools for SAP environments. The deal is expected to give Attunity a better solution to sell to companies adopting SAP’s HANA in-memory technology. Hayes Technology Group was founded in 1998 and develops a range of data management tools for SAP environments. Its Gold Client Solutions suite includes functionality in the area of master data management (MDM), testing, security, and synchronization. Attunity CEO Shimon Alon says the deal will give his company coverage into the global SAP

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• IBM Winds Down Older CPU And Memory Ahead Of Power8

  January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the new year, and Big Blue is prepping for the Power8 system launch as well as updates to the IBM i and sometime around the middle of the year. IBM likes to give customers plenty of warning when there is a maintenance price hike or when it will be withdrawing certain processors and features from the market, and last week it fired off the first announcement of 2014 that shows the company is gearing up for Power8. Expect more announcements, perhaps better deals to encourage customers to move up to Power7+ machines rather than wait for the Power8

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• Key Info Unlocks Its Cloud

  January 20, 2014 Dan Burger

  Key Information Systems, the IBM midrange platform reseller and systems integrator, has flipped the switch on its new data center featuring Power Systems as the key component in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. This is a natural progression from the acquisition of ISWest in August. The Key Cloud is designed to assist current and prospective customers, particularly those with Power System iron with hosted options and managed services for at least some of their enterprise IT requirements. The idea that many organizations no longer require the physical, on-premise presence of computer hardware, at least not to the

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• Old Code And High Maintenance

  January 20, 2014 Dan Burger

  There are old RPG applications that just run and run. Minimal maintenance is required and the people who depend on these apps couldn’t be happier. But, you may have heard, this bliss is not universal. More often, application maintenance gets sloppy as the fingerprints of many coders, some perhaps with dubious credentials, takes a toll. Add a growing demand that applications do more and rely on data from multiple systems. New demands and old apps make for an odd couple. Talk with an RPG programmer who deals with old code in a high maintenance circumstance and one that requires old

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Curate’s Eggs

  January 20, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  Bring Your Own Device is turning business computing inside out. Corporate support squads are now obliged to cope with free range users’ diverse machines. Gadgets running iOS, Android, Fire OS, and Chrome can give support personnel acute headaches, but they aren’t the most nefarious ones. The worst annoyances come from weakly managed Windows, which becomes infested by browser cooties like the Ask Toolbar, smuggled in during Java updates, or the McAfee Siteadvisor, subversively installed when Flash is patched. In the BYOD looking glass world, Windows can be less practical than any of the mobile operating systems. A key

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• JD Edwards And The Big Red Money Machine

  January 20, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The end of 2013 brought some significant milestones for Oracle‘s JD Edwards customers. Specifically, JDE World and EnterpriseOne shops that are running older releases can no longer get mainstream tech support from Oracle. If you’re one of those shops and you’re running your applications on IBM i, you’ve undoubtedly heard all about this from Oracle, in no uncertain terms. Among ERP vendors, nobody is as active as Oracle in policing its users and enforcing licensing agreements. Whether it is signing a new enterprise software contract or negotiating a renewal, “aggressive” is a word that has been used to describe

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• IBM Broadens Power Systems SAS Adapters

  January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long time since the Power 795 was first introduced, and the machine is getting a bit long in the tooth with the Power8 systems looming for initial delivery sometime around the middle of this year. But IBM needs to keep trying to push these high-end, and presumably very profitable machines. Last November, IBM cut the prices on processors and main memory for the Power 795, and now the company is offering new SAS controllers aimed at grafting flash storage and recent LTO tape drives onto the big bad boxes. In announcement letter 113-010, IBM is

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